b'one. The figures in the foreground here, on the slatted benches along the path made with hexagonal paving stones, remain somewhat ghost-like, ob-servations begun only to be suspended. Otherwise they recall the sorts of figures Vuillard and Bonnard captured in their park paintings made a cen-tury ago in France. At right in the painting, where large dogs are entering the picture, Ruttenberg has indicated a park portrait artist at work, with a bystander seeming to watch, while the silhouettes of horse-drawn carriages are visible further back. Overgrowing in the foreground with these ghostly figures are white blossoms rendered with visionary intensity. One day when I visited Ruttenberg at her studio, I found her working from branches of pear tree blossoms in enormous vases, and I needed some sort of explana-tion. As if channeling van Gogh, she explained that the short-lived, close-up beauty of the delicate white flowers was lost in the distance, both in her rendition of the reflection in the puddle and in her rendition of the trees themselves encircling the gilded statue. Consequently she needed a way to indicate them at another still more intimate scale, whether they were there or not, since the painting as a whole is about the most ephemeral springtime beauty, visualized in these blossoms. The extra-close-up flowers are no more visionary than the seated figures to either side of the puddle, both based on interrelated Raphael and Manet prototypes. Here, the male figure is an apparition of her husband Derald, whom she lost in 2004. More re-cently she has begun to use video components to animate some of her paintings, and she now projects a video of birds splashing in a puddle on the original sketch under plastic, animating the whole scene with uncanny po-etry. She was delighted when I asked her whether she had been inspired by the little airborne bird in Manets Le Djeuner sur lHerbe that appears ready to land on the figure of the reclining man. Her idea to integrate her videos and her Central Park paintings is most elaborately realized in several smaller paintings made at John Quincy'